Helen Wechsler, the director of Boston College Dining Services, remembers the pork chop in brown gravy being passed off as a Jamaican dish. New to BCDS, Wechsler questioned the staff about it. One of the cooks, who was from the Caribbean, admitted it was not a Jamaican recipe.
“He said, ‘We don’t use our own recipes,’ and I asked why, and they looked at me as if I was from Mars,” she said with a laugh, recalling when she first joined the foodservice division for the private Jesuit university near Boston.
This semester, pork loin Cubano with garlic-citrus sauce, shrimp Creole, and Moghlai chicken with almonds and raisins are just some of the ethnic dishes available at the 11 dining locations on Boston College’s two campuses. To ensure authenticity, BCDS broke from its tradition of using nutritionists and dieticians to develop menus and instead reached out to its diverse staff to completely revamp its food offerings. The evolution started about seven years ago, and now it’s the managers and cooks who continue to update the menus every three years and make seasonal adjustments.
International flavor Foodservice operators and chefs today are reaching out to their customers and employees to enrich menu offerings and keep up with trends. At the same time, such vested involvement from customers and workers is a powerful retention tool, they say. Brett McKee, co-owner and executive chef of Oak Steakhouse in Charleston, S.C., used social media to gather menu ideas. McKee asked about 5,000 Facebook friends to send him family recipes. He received more than 200 suggestions in a single night. He tweaked the best of them and added them to the menu at his other restaurant, 17 North Roadside Kitchen in nearby Mount Pleasant, S.C. The resulting menu appeals to locals and gives them a sense of ownership and loyalty, he said. Cable food channels and the Internet have made food top of mind for consumers, said menu development consultant Phyllis Ann Marshall of Food Power Inc. in Newport Beach, Calif. “People are watching and learning and seeing all these exotic ingredients,” she said. “It’s expanded our world. Chefs need to avail themselves of all the resources possible.” Turning to its own cooks and managers for help in creating a diverse menu was an obvious strategy for BCDS, Wechsler said. At last count, more than 33 different countries were represented among BCDS’ 52 managers, 235 full-time employees, and 400 part-timers and 460 student workers. “We have a very diverse kitchen—from Ireland to Kazakhstan, Vietnam to Thailand,” she said. “We have a lot of Central and South American employees. You name it, we have it: lots of languages, lots of beautiful, interesting stories of people who have come here as immigrants.” Staffers take the wheel To collect employee input, BCDS came up with a general set of concepts and asked teams of cooks and managers to develop a concept book with recipes and procedures. Each team had a lead manager and a lead culinary person, who was not necessarily a high-ranking person in the kitchen. “We said, if you were going to open a restaurant, these are the things you need to have,” Wechsler said. “It was basically an operational manual with food, recipes, numbers, layout of the operations, and a staffing grid for it.” The teams came up with Taqueria, a Mexican concept that offered burritos and tacos; Wok Away, an Asian stir-fry; and Mozzarello’s, an Italian concept. Most of the concepts became food stations in the various dining halls or ethnic dishes were added to menus of existing locations, such as the Blazing Bowl and gourmet pizzas. BCDS no longer does cafeteria-style dining, opting instead for à la carte service more akin to the order-at-the-counter style of fast-casual restaurants. Invested employees Initially, being asked to come up with new menus and concept plans was challenging for the staff, said Marlon Mazier, who is from Honduras and is a first cook at the McElroy building. “It involved a lot of change, and people do not like change,” he said. “Once we got into it, we really got into it. People like myself look forward to it every year. Every semester we try to do changes to the menu.” When the teams started meeting, they took field trips to restaurants around town to check out the competition. The teams still keep an eye on local trends. This semester, BCDS is doing a macaroni-and-cheese bar concept similar to the New York restaurant, S’MAC. Diners add their choice of vegetables, sauce and protein to their macaroni. “It took off,” said production manager Paul Rielly. “I think the students are very happy with what we do. They get excited when we do something different.” BCDS’s goal is to retain as many students and faculty as possible for every meal. The division serves more than 22,000 meals a day, Wechsler said. “Our sales have gone up pretty steadily,” she said. “Variety is a big issue for students. They have become much better educated in world cuisine.” The palates of young people demand f lavor and spice, even in cities like Boston, Marshall said. “In the old days, New England food was classified as boiled dinner,” Marshall said. “The concept used to be, the colder the weather, the less demand there was for seasoning and spice. But now people have much more experimental palates.”